


you can't get what you want (but you can get me)

by horrorterroronesie



Category: The Aeneid - Virgil, The Mechanisms (Band), Ulysses Dies at Dawn - The Mechanisms (Album)
Genre: Other, Suicide, just for tw. its canon typical, they/them dido, wonder if you could make an electromagnetic generator with virgil's rapidly spinning corpse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:42:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24536404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horrorterroronesie/pseuds/horrorterroronesie
Summary: The City had dug deep, deep into the heart of their world. Built as high as lungs could bear, then higher still.How can you run when there’s nothing to run to? And a whole planet to run away from?
Relationships: Aeneas (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)/Dido of Carthage (Ancient Roman Religion & Lore)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17
Collections: The Mechanisms But Without The Mechanisms (Summer 2020)





	you can't get what you want (but you can get me)

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [DuskDragon39](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DuskDragon39/pseuds/DuskDragon39) in the [mechs_albums_summer_2020](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/mechs_albums_summer_2020) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Ulysses Dies at Dawn begins with the story of the Trojan Horse, and how Ulysses created a weapon to destroy Illium. Tell me though- what about the one who survived? What happened to Aeneas and his family and allies, warned in advance by one of the Olympians? Is there another district now, far to the west of the ruins of Illium, where Ascanius waits for the day when his family finally gains back the power they lost?

**0\. aeneas**

The City had dug deep, deep into the heart of their world. Built as high as lungs could bear, then higher still.

How can you run when there’s nothing to run to? And a whole planet to run away from?

Thing is, Aeneas knows he’s living on borrowed time. Every favour he was owed was just enough to have him and a small handful of others survive the slaughter at Ilium. Not even ten people. All he has with him is bone-deep guilt and the burnt remains of the connections he’d cultivated his whole life.

He isn’t a soldier. And he isn’t a good man. What he is is an opportunist, someone who’d eked out his living up until that point on the backs of the City’s dark secrets and back doors.

That’ll have to be enough.

  
**i. the escape**

When the twentieth person he contacts tells him to fuck off before he brings the entirety of the City’s law enforcement down on them, he accepts it was never going to get him anywhere. He’s grasping at straws and he knows it. But his father is dying and he needs to get  _ out _ of the City, even if he needs to stow away on somebody’s ship to do it, because he isn’t going to let him be harvested for their damned Acheron. Not one person more.

“Mother. I need your help.” He says into the comms. The words burn like bile. This is the last resort, his final thread of connection fraying at the edges.

See, the story had gone like this:

Once upon a time, there was an Olympian. Not one of the main players, though the designation itself classed her far above the rabble. After that point, the minutiae mean nothing. There was an Olympian and there was a man, and there was him, left to pick up the pieces.

Well, his mother could make up for it now.

  
  
**ii. the flight**

They stow away on a repair ship to an orbiting satellite, then catch another ship his mother had arranged for. Tiny, falling apart, but it brings them out of the solar system well enough.

His father dies on the first planet they stop at. He dies, and they all weep tears of joy for his freedom. Is it traitorous, that a deep part of him is afraid of it? The Olympian in his blood, clawing to get out.

They can’t keep it up forever. Others die, too, as they traverse the stars in search of shelter. Problems in cryo, the stupidest forms of food poisoning, disputes with the local law enforcement.

Which brings him to the next point.

  
  
  


**iii. the respite**

Dido is like a force of nature. 

He meets them as their band of refugees is brought before the newest planet’s government. 

They beg for shelter, for respite, and are granted it. He looks at the stony eyes of the monarch and sees a fire reflected into his own.

  
  


The next time they meet, it’s as equals. His crew, if he could ever have called it that, has dispersed across the planet of Carthage. It’s him alone, it seems, that feels the all-consuming urge to run, run as far away as possible and further yet, or instead barricade himself in influence and power.

Dido ( _damn it all he really does love them)_ sees right through him.

  
  


And now they meet as lovers, perhaps, or as tectonic plates struggling against each other. 

“You’re an idiot, Aeneas.” His lips ache with bruises yet unformed. “You always want more, and you always fall short. It’ll ruin you.” They kiss him again. His head hits the wall. He’d argue, but right then he’s not in a position to do much of anything. The supply closet they’ve found themselves in doesn’t lend itself to things other than kissing or being brained by a mop.

He leans back in, fingernails tangling in Dido’s hair.

“It hasn’t ruined me yet.”

  
  
**iv. the fall**

Looking back, there is no single choice that he made that he has issue with. Not the embezzling which, surprisingly, was a proper  _ crime _ here, not the single-minded focus with which he pursued some unknown goal-

But here there is a consequence.

Dido looks at him with teeth bared. His lipstick is still smudged on their neck. 

Then they grab his hand, blaster in hand, and point it at their own forehead.

“You’re not taking this from me. Not my planet, not my power. Not my love.”

Always wanting more. It was the same thinking that led the City to its ruin. Here he stands at a chasm and he’d chosen wrong, he’d chosen right, he’d chosen to make a bid for power and this is what it had cost him-

They pull the trigger as the guards burst into the room.

  
  
**v. the desolation**

After that, things get a bit fuzzy. 

A mess of blood and he thinks for one delirious moment, is this it? The dead of Ilium come to take what is theirs? The madness come again to draw its pound of flesh?

Anna screams over their body.

The world bleeds.

There’s a woman, he thinks, a woman with sharp teeth and one eye walking away with long-dead Dido. 

But that can’t be right.

  
  
**vi. the end**

No, not the end.

Long after the end.

Through the telescope, Ascanius can see it burning.

A planet burning so brightly that he’d almost mistaken it for its sun. It might have been poetic, in a way, if he could have found the words for it. What would be left, after the buildings all burned down? A world of ash? How long, then, until life came back to it, mosses and lichens and molds the first to return, soon harbouring life the likes of which hadn’t existed in living memory?

There’s a sharp-toothed woman standing by his side. But his father had never told him about her.

She has a ship, she says. She can take him there if he wants to go.

“Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! hope i did this prompt justice! find me on tumblr at cyberiandemons, also the title is from on melancholy hill by gorillaz


End file.
